I tell myself it won’t be that cold, this time of year. I tell myself I used to jump all the time, before my body knew how to be afraid, back when I thought Mom and Jasper and me were untouchable, inviolate, not lucky so much as too quick for the bad luck to catch up with us. I count slowly backward from ten, the way Mr. Cole taught me.
It doesn’t work. My legs remain stiff and motionless. My heart thrashes in my throat. I can feel the shudder of Mayhew’s boots coming closer, see the sickly blue shine of the flashlight on my skin.
I just can’t do it. Won’t. I’ve had too many nightmares about going under, fought too hard to stay on dry land.
Except: Arthur went down, and I know him too well to imagine he’s coming back up unless I drag him behind me, a sullen Eurydice. I know the hard set of his jaw and the soft slide of his lips, I know the terrible guilt that drives him and the scars it left behind. I know he is the thing I have been chasing and craving, searching and waiting and hoping for my entire life: home.
I step into the mist and let it carry me down soft and slow. I slip into the river easily, almost gently, as if the water was waiting for me, open-armed.
TWENTY-NINE
I was never a strong swimmer, and it’s been eleven years since I was in deep water.
Bev said there used to be a public pool down in Bowling Green, but they filled it with cement rather than desegregate in ’64, so most kids only know enough dog paddle to keep their chins above water.
I don’t even do that much, tonight. I let the current sweep me south, my toes dragging sometimes against weeds and stones, my mouth full of the metal taste of the water. My face bobs to the surface three times before I see the stretch of riverbank beneath the mines. I’m not sure how I recognize it in the dark, but I do, just from the particular tilt of a willow oak, the bend of the bank. Apparently the maps you make in childhood never fade, but are merely folded away until you need them again.
I flail for the shore and crawl out on hands and knees. The silt under my nails sends bile up my throat, and I waste five heaving breaths reminding myself that I’m not fifteen and there isn’t a red Corvette sinking behind me. I stand, and my legs are a pair of matchsticks, jointless and fragile.
Voices fall down from the bridge above, hitting the water and echoing downriver. I hear the words where and Jesus. A beam of light tunnels through the mist, pointed at the place where my body went under the water. I can almost picture Constable Mayhew shaking his head, doleful and sanctimonious. Just like her mother.
Maybe he’s right. My mom scrabbled and fought and hoped right up to the very end, and so will I.
I scramble up the bank, the clay slicking under my feet. I can’t see the shaft entrance beneath the dark mass of undergrowth, so I thump my fist against the bank until it rings hollow. I rip at the vines like an animal digging a den, breaking long strings of kudzu, uprooting ivy in uneven bursts, until the air smells weepy and green and my palms are tacky with sap. In the red-blue flash of the light I see old wood, the rusted remnants of a sign that now reads, ominously, ANGER. The boards have gone ripe with rot, and mist slips through the gaps and trickles down to the river. I’m almost relieved to see it, because it means I was right, and there’s another way down to Underland.
The wood crumbles in my hands, spilling rich earth and pill bugs down my sleeves. The air that rushes from the mine is stale and fetid, a motel room left all summer with the AC off and the windows shut. The hole I’ve made shows me nothing but featureless black, a darkness so complete it seems almost solid.
I kick through the last of the boards and step into the mines. I have no light, no map, no plan except to place one hand on the dewy stone wall and walk, feeling like a kid who took a dare she shouldn’t have and wants badly to back down.
The floor is uncomfortably soft, my toes sinking into alluvial drifts of soil and fungus, followed by sudden hills of sharp rock, then clammy limestone. I crack my shin hard on a fallen timber and climb over it awkwardly, blindly. In some places the walls have collapsed inward, so that I have to crawl over the pile with my spine scraping the ceiling. The air is cool and foul on my face. The wall vanishes beneath my hand sometimes, when a tunnel branches off, but I never hesitate long. I choose whichever direction leads me down.
I go deeper. Deeper still. I picture weight accumulating above me: dirt and tree roots, paved parking lots, the great metal bones of Big Jack himself.
The tunnel narrows, and the timbers grow sporadic, less square. Soon the shaft is no wider than my shoulders, a rathole carved roughly into the earth. I think of the story Charlotte played for me in the library, that old woman’s voice shaking with a fear that had been passed down through her family like slow poison. Under my palm—raw and stinging now, from dragging along the stone—I can feel the desperate scars of picks and drills, the scratch marks of men driven beyond themselves, into madness.